The Weidberg Family During the War
The Testimony of Susan Schwarzbach Karpfen
Great-great-granddaughter of Chaim Weidberg

Beginning December, 1941, the German invaders started to round up able-bodied Jews in Skala and send them to concentration labor camps. Out of 400 Jews from Skala sent to those camps during this period, only five survived. All of the rest perished.

On September 26th to 27th, 1942, almost half of the Jewish population, including our Rabbi Drimmer of Skala, was sent to an extermination camp. Old people and sick people were shot in their beds. The remaining Jews, including our family, were sent to the Borszczow Ghetto. All thirteen members of my family survived, although most others perished during the liquidation pogrom in Borszczow.

Field in Borszczow
where Jews deported from Skala
were murdered by Nazis in 1943

From March, 1943 until December, 1943, a Jewish resistance group was active in the forest. In December, 1943, outnumbered and surrounded by a large German army unit, most members of the resistance group were killed in battle but not before they were able to inflict many casualties on the Germans. My mother [Rivka Sosia Weidberg Schwarzbach], my brother David [Dovid Moishe Schwarzbach], and I were hiding in the forest during this time. We met the daughter of Serka Schwartz [son of Esther Weidberg and Aaron Schwartz], my second cousin and Sam Schwartz's niece, in the forest. She was the only member of that resistance group to have survived the battle. Though she survived the war, she died a year later of leukemia.

As to Simche Weidberg's children who remained in Skala: His daughter Chana Golde Weidberg Kimmel and her two children, Lucia Sluva and Regina Kimmel, were killed in 1943 in the Borszczow Ghetto. Malka Rosenbaum Weidberg, the wife of Simche's son Berish Dov, was killed by the Nazis in 1941. Simche's daughter Rivka Sosia Weidberg, my mother, married Hersh Schwarzbach. My father Hersh and my siblings Chuna 19, Max Mordechai (17), his twin sister Betka Beila (17), and Simcha (an infant born in 1943) all were killed by the Nazis and the Poles. Only my mother, my brother David and I survived.

Susan Schwarzbach Karpfen
in a photograph taken at the
Skala luncheon (NY, 2006)